mac version downloading problems

[ejonesss]

Plan

premium

Country

usa

Device

Mac mini (2018)

Operating System

10.15.7 (19H1519) catalina

My Question or Issue

i noticed when i change the download location while a bunch of folders are created in the new location when i download the songs/playlists the files are not being placed in the folder.

i changed the location because the mac mini 2018 i have is the 128gb version witch is not a whole lot of disk space so i changed to an external drive.

and as a test i downloaded a song to confirm it is working offline and disconnected the internet and while that worked.

the files are still being downloaded to the * ~/Library/Caches/com.spotify.Client/storage location.

so i tried making an alias of the cache folder and linking the alias to the external drive that did not work.

when i copied the cache folder to the external drive then made symbolic link and copied symbolic link to the  place where the cache normally lives it was able to download to the external storage.

i upgraded to premium specifically to be able to download as well as be ad free.

my intent is to be able to download and move the files to an offline player that does not have very good internet connection such as a nuk that is in another location where the connection is only good enough to go online and get the keys for playing.

now before you go off saying something like "why not move the nuk to a location where it can get better connection" or something like that the whole idea is to download on 1 machine and put on external drive and move to another location.

thanks

[Jeremy]

Hi there @ejonesss,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community.

Can you perform a clean reinstall of the app? This will make sure there's no old cache files causing this.

If that doesn't do the trick, we suggest that you contact our customer support and ask them to remove any possible corrupt device.

Let us know how it goes.

Take care!

[ejonesss]

i tried all that but it did not work i even tried moving the storage to a mechanical drive incase it is an issue with ssd and even the reducing the cache using the prefs hack

i made a video of the process 24 meg

note when i start a download it starts off fast then stalls and the only way i found to nudge it along somewhat was to use a script to toggle the offline mode off and on repeatedly and even then it only nudges a couple songs and that is a pain.

unfortunately it is too big for your attachments so i am uploading to youtube and here is the video

https://youtu.be/JY8AdVVpU5U

[Alex]

Hey @ejonesss,

Thanks for the reply and the video.

We'd recommend reaching out to our customer support team, as Jeremy recommended and request that they clear the corrupted cache on your offline devices.

This can cause issues like the one you're describing, since it should be possible for the app to download cache in the location you've choosen from Settings, even though it's on an external hard drive. Note that if the drive gets disconnected the app will revert to the default download location and automatically download your playlists there.

Keep us psoted on how you get on.

[ejonesss]

i dont have any other devices and even then it should not exhibit that problem if i try on another mac or pc.

oh i did try a vpn both in new york and california to rule out internet traffic problems.

i just tried it with another playlist set today to test a theory that maybe it runs into a song that is been removed on your end due to things like copyrights where the artist or label no longer wants the song on your services or artist has abused the stats collection process and it seem to skip the unavailable songs without slowing down .

the only thing i can think of is overloaded servers or you are performing the encryption on the user's end

a suggestion: you may want to try doing the encryption on server end and store the songs pre encrypted.

the advantage of pre encrypting is you can secure the content better than if you make the user's end. do the encrypting as it is done on the server before the song is even posted for download.

so when you rip the cds to post the songs you may want to pre encode the 4 different quality levels and encrypt all 4 copies of each song so the server can serve them up immediately rather than on the fly.

[MafeG]

Hi @ejonesss,

Thank you for keeping in touch and sharing those insights. 

To continue working on this, we need to discard any issues with the cache of your account since most problems with downloads of any kind can be tracked down to a corrupted cache. 

In this case, please follow the link that @Jeremy shared to contact our folks from Customer Support who can check and remove any possible damaged cache.

We'll be on the lookout.

[ejonesss]

i guess you dont want to test it your self.

download a bunch of playlists and watch the downloads count and see it stall to confirm it is not me.

i have done the deletion and reinstall several times to rule out hard drive issues and i have tried von to other parts of the united states to rule out issues with the internet and desktop is the only device i have and if it was a corrupt device then the problem would go away with running on another device and it did not so it is not corruption.

also corruption would usually make databases completely unreadable so thereby for example the songs would redownload.